One Big Idea

A very smart friend of mine once said that the difference between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and thus between ­Microsoft and PCs and Apple, was simply that Bill Gates thought everyone wanted to be a programmer, at least a little bit, and Steve Jobs said, Oh, no, they don't.

Gates and Jobs both came out of the world of hobbyists and tech enthusiasts who invented the personal computer and loved electricity and electronics and machines and mathematical logic. They looked at the world of mainframe computers run by professional programmers and thought, anybody can have this. Steve Wozniak, who built the first Apple computer, was one of those hobbyists. But Steve Jobs, the other side of the Apple equation, thought different. He saw a much bigger world opening, where nobody had to program or tinker, but people could do things far beyond anything they had done with computers before, or even thought of doing.

Computers had been huge adaptable calculating machines. The first PCs built with Microsoft's DOS operating system followed that formula. They were great for formatting documents and for building spreadsheets and databases. They ­allowed you to get inside them and insert commands into programs to alter almost anything. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs made his famous visit to Xerox PARC in 1979 and instantly grasped the potential of the graphical user interface and the mouse as nobody else did, as ways to make the user's connection to a computer far more direct and intuitive. It was as if the inventors of the automobile had thought, here's a great replacement for the horse that you can play with and modify to no end, but only one of them saw romance, luxury and power, as well as a new way of life and a reordering of human interactions.

That fundamentally different view is behind all of Steve Jobs' accomplishments. It brought us the first Macintosh computer, introducing to a mass market the GUI and the mouse, and the ease of use they made possible. It led him to his experiments with the Next computer and then to the iMac after he returned to Apple, when he moved further beyond the original narrow view of the personal computer by renouncing the ubiquitous putty-colored box with a monitor on top of it. It lifted him to see beyond a personal computer to a personal music device using the PC's potential in a totally user-friendly way. It enabled him to see that smartphones needn't be just phones wedded to mini-PCs with mini-keyboards. And on to the iPad, freeing us from the keyboard and mouse, and iCloud, unleashing us from all our wires and cables and our tethering to localized data storage. Nobody else thought of these things.

Or at least no one else thought of these things and saw them through. The other side of Steve Jobs' greatness is, of course, his courage. As his biographer Alan Deutschman said in the New York Times, "The big thing about Steve Jobs is not his genius or his charisma but his extraordinary risk-taking. Apple has been so innovative because Jobs takes major risks, which is rare in corporate America. He doesn't market-test anything. It's all his own judgment and perfectionism and gut."

There was a heavy price to pay for Jobs' stubborn genius in going in a different direction from everyone else and doing something so much harder, if ultimately so much more productive and creative than just building PCs. The price was that for decades, as Microsoft took command of the world of business and workplace computing that was the foundation of the PC industry, most people saw Apple as a maker of overpriced, prettified luxury goods that lacked some of the core functionality of PCs. The company barely survived, and Jobs had to pass his time in exile. But in the last couple of years, when Apple first passed Microsoft in market capitalization and then briefly became the richest company on earth, all that was forgotten.

As tragic as the present moment is, the fact that Jobs could do so many brilliant things for so long is almost a miracle.